Nicolas Wilson's Blog: News about the novels and writing of Nicolas Wilson - Posts Tagged "unreleased"

Good morning everybody! I've been procrastinating on this for a little bit, but as Nexus is nearing completion, it's time to start sharing excerpts. Remember, this is only a preview. Some of the writing may change after its final visit with the editor.

I'll be posting chapter 1 in pieces, one section a week. Expect the full novel around August. Hopefully a bit earlier.


Happy reading!

Nexus: Chapter 1, Part 1

My drink tasted like Martian goat piss; goats never completely acclimated to the terraformed red planet, something about not having the optimal mix of methane and ammonia. Not that I advocated drinking goat piss, generally, but focusing on that awful taste let me tell myself my mind wasn't elsewhere, even if that tasted like Martian goat piss, too.

“You're thinking of Dalaxia,” SecDiv said, shattering my conviction that she couldn't still be sitting next to me.

“Hmm?” I asked, but the muscles in my neck were too relaxed to look up from the bar, and I don’t think I succeeded in making my face look any less droll.

“When you've been drinking, when you've relaxed enough that your mind can wander, there's a look you get. It means you're thinking of Dalaxia.”

“I might be,” I said. Times like this I hated that she knew me as well as she did.

“And I've never known that to be a good thing.”

“Me, either.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“Do you?” I asked, and she thought a moment and shuddered. It was hard to know which particular aspect of Dalaxia was haunting her: the way that entire world seemed to scream as that whole world burned, the choke of smoke rolling off burning flesh, or the way that planet made us hate people, and each other.
I summoned the strength to look at her; or maybe it was just that I knew she wouldn't be able to look at me, after that.

“Come on,” she said, pushing out of her chair. “I'll get you home.” She put an arm around my torso and pulled me off my stool. She steadied me on my feet, I wasn't sure if she was surprisingly strong, or if I was just that plastered and malleable.

She was definitely less in the bag than me, because she weaved her way back to my cabin. She leaned me against my doorway.

“I won't be able to sleep,” I told her, though I didn't mean anything by it; I was having difficulty feeling everything below the pounding beginning in my head, so I had no reason to think the spirit was willing. But that was Dalaxia in a nutshell, and unfortunately, my relationship with SecDiv, as well. That colony was where we stopped pretending we were only fucking each other, and it was also where I lost her.

“Me, either,” she said coldly, and walked the other direction.

I sighed, and fell into my cabin. I missed the bed by a foot, but my floor was surprisingly comfortable. I scrolled idly through my heads-up display on my eyescreen, and saw that I had a message from my cousin Brian. But they were never just messages; they were the start of interminable conversations that only ended when it got more excruciating to stay and humor him than to walk away and intentionally hurt his feelings. I loved him, and would gladly help him through his problems, but he had a depressive tendency, which meant I wasn’t so much helping as listening while he mangled a half-dozen melancholy clichés together, and I just didn’t have the will to go through that; I still wasn’t sure I had the will to make it all the way into my bed.

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